Saturday, 24 March 2012

TUGGA LOVE?

True Grit

The gimlet eyes adjusted to the unremitting glare of the Australian
sunlight (and the global spotlight); crow’s feet, the visible bodily inscription of many hours of unyielding concentration; the metronomic mastication, pausing only
when a foe is to be faced down; a hint of stubble, on which perhaps to scuff a
ball ready to swing Irish. Didn’t give much away, ‘Tugga’ Waugh.

Game face. Although primarily associated with the ice-veined
players of high-stakes poker, the importance of a ‘game face’ is a commonplace
of all professional sports, perhaps all competitive environments. Indeed, there
are some strains of Cultural Studies that claim that in all our everyday social interactions we are in some sense performing
(not for nothing does persona derive
from the Latin for ‘mask’). Of course, such a desolate hypothesis gives the
impression that us latter day homo
sapiens are – from the cradle to the cricket field, nightclub to the negotiating
table – all highly calculating über-pragmatists happy to pin ‘appropriate’ sentiments
to our face according to context, when in fact we know full-well that our authentic,
if unruly, emotions are always threatening to irrupt and overwhelm our self-containment, restraint, and decorum. Just ask Glenn McGrath.

However, it is often assumed that once such fiercely driven
sportsfolk as McGrath and Waugh exit the furnace of top-level competition, the
game face is left there to burn. Suddenly, these predatory creatures are
amiable, approachable, perhaps generous-spirited; where once they crackled with
the energy of a seemingly bottomless ruthlessness and bristled at the slightest
provocation, now they are affable, cordial, gracious even.

WAUGH: "What the fuck are you looking at?"AMBROSE: "Don't cuss me, man"WAUGH: "Why don't you go and get fucked"

For cricket lovers of a certain age, Steve Waugh was just
about the most hard-nosed and remorseless competitor of his era: giving it,
taking it, never shirking it, always meeting obstacles head on. There were
those piercing, gunslinger’s eyes, which were either fixated on the source of
danger or, from gully – the quintessential lone ranger’s position, off at the
edge of the pack yet where the bullets fly fastest – boring into some fresh
quarry. From a distance, the arch gum-chewer remained a largely taciturn presence
on the field, words seemingly redundant when you are already irradiating such
menace. This silence was but a fragile accord, though, and when his mouth
opened it seemed to carry nuclear-level threat. At times, he seemed to be
affectless, the reptilian brain of our hominid ancestors writ large, batting
with lizard stillness and sporadic celerity, motionless until a sinuous snap
took his body into a ball with width, either flaying cuts or dropping
concrete-heavy hands on a square drive. Unfussy. Insatiable. Always happy to
keep you on the wrack. Finally, there was that jaunty, ten-to-two gait and swinging
shoulders that simply refused to sag, even when carrying his team through a
tough day on tough pitches against the toughest of bowlers, giant bowlers who
he would stare down, swear down, and more often than not wear down. The
granite-hewn legend is well known.

However, Waugh is also – and always was, of course – a
bright, articulate and open-minded soul, not only intensely aware of the
traditions of his own culture but a pioneer in dragging the game forward,
keeping it in step with (and sometimes a pace or two in front of) the changing
desires of the audience. Most impressively, he used the wealth and fame that
cricket has bestowed upon him to channel enormous quantities of financial and
emotional assistance to the impoverished people of India (in particular, the Udayan
leper colony in Kolkata). Here was a Baggy Green-revering citizen of the world;
a humanist and humanitarian whose charitable impulses are blind to, and
overflowed, national borders, nestling where need was greatest.

So it was that at the Trent Bridge library recently, I
opened Waugh’s autobiography, Out of my
Comfort Zone,expecting to see
the gnarled Aussie warrior to have mellowed sufficiently to be able to express
a certain amount of sympathy and suppressed admiration for English cricket,
sentiments he was constitutionally unable to show while still competing against
an opponent over whom his country lorded for all but the first series of a
nineteen-year Test career (one that took in eight Ashes campaigns), a dominance
in which he was as prominent as any of England’s other tormentors – be that
Warne, McGrath, Gilchrist or whomever.

Research took me to the Index, and there it was: the main
entry for ‘English Cricket’, with a total of 14 sub-entries that, read as a list,
provided an interesting…well, index of
Tugga’s longstanding basic outlook on the old foe. Yes, there’s the caveat that
this view is of only those sides that he faced, the calamitous, revolving-door
years, and not ‘English cricket’ construed as some entity with permanent
characteristics. There’s also the very real possibility that the indexing was
not the work of his own hand. Even so, these 14 sub-headings are a gorgeous
snapshot of an era of Aussie hegemony – perhaps contempt – from which England
supporters will feel glad to have awoken, a summation in miniature of our
myriad failings and the abject futility of our desperate hopes at the time that we might, might... They are a
bullet-point bullet-proof indictment of why we didn’t have a prayer.

Readers of Out of my
Comfort Zone wishing to investigate S.R. Waugh’s views on ‘English Cricket,
157’ could therefore have looked under the following headings, listed
alphabetically:

English cricket, 157

Australian stranglehold begins,
273, 274

caught between youth and
experience, 3

damned in the press, 114, 209,
609

‘dead rubber’ syndrome, 472

familiarity through county
matches, 193

fear of Australia, 599

lack of self-belief, 496

lack of total commitment, 206,
207

local negativity, 609

no fun, 282, 283

poor fielding, 496

search for a captain, 609

volatile crowds, 600

weakness against spin, 497

In the same way that Waugh’s charitable works have transcended local, parochial
concerns, I hoped my nationality would not overheat the passions and thus occlude the genuine tug of admiration I felt for this most cussed of cricketers, one who, from the moment
he took guard – before, in fact – never, ever let his guard drop. Truly, the
most formidable game face of them all.